Contentions

Miami Marlins Manager Ozzie Guillen will be using his day off to fly back to Florida today to hold a news conference tomorrow to make a public apology for his published remarks in which he spoke of his “love” for longtime Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. While the famously loquacious and largely unrestrained Guillen is entitled to his opinion, the fact that the institution that employs him understands that a public mea culpa is necessary illustrates that at least in southern Florida, expressing affection for a Communist murderer is not deemed acceptable behavior.

Guillen, a native of Venezuela who stirred up a much smaller controversy when he previously spoke of his admiration for that country’s authoritarian leader Hugo Chavez, has a reputation for shooting off his mouth about just about anything rather than being a political activist. Though Cuban-Americans are rightly up in arms about what he said and any hint of a boycott of the Marlins game would be disastrous for a franchise desperate to attract fans to their new ballpark, it is likely that Guillen will survive this mess. But what is interesting about this kerfuffle is the fact that it may be one of the last gasps of an effort to hold the Havana regime in opprobrium despite the efforts of many liberals (and the Obama administration) to lower the volume of protests about human rights in Cuba.

Guillen is far from the only person who has given Castro some love lately. Hollywood leftists such as Sean Penn and Oliver Stone have lauded the Cuban regime and even mainstream media stars like Andrea Mitchell have bought into Michael Moore’s lies about the Communist regime’s health care system being better than that of the United States. For many liberals, focusing on Cuba’s lack of political freedom is an unwelcome throwback to the Cold War. The plight of Cubans who lack basic human rights and live in squalor largely due to their government’s Stalinist ideology means little to most Americans who have come to view the cause of Cuban freedom with indifference if not distaste. There’s little doubt that had Guillen stayed with the Chicago White Sox or gone to some other team without a potent Cuban-American constituency, he would not be on the hot seat on which he currently finds himself.

That alone is a reason to think that firing would be unfair even if it is difficult to sympathize with him. He is fortunate to have expressed sympathy for a mere Communist murderer rather than to have uttered anything that could be construed as racist. This is, after all, the 30th anniversary of the interview on ABC’s “Nightline” program in which Los Angeles Dodgers General Manager Al Campanis lost his job when he claimed African-Americans lacked the “necessities” to be baseball managers and executives. Though Campanis had earned far more goodwill in a long career of racial fair dealing than the obnoxious Guillen has ever done (Guillen dodged a similar bullet earlier in his career for uttering an anti-gay slur), his career vanished in an instant with one foolish and wrongheaded remark.

Those who cry for Guillen’s head will probably be disappointed, and that’s not an entirely bad thing. The practice of making celebrities walk the plank for saying the wrong thing in the wrong place for things for which they might otherwise get a pass for under other circumstances is not a particularly attractive aspect of American popular culture. But while I’m not sorry to see Guillen forced to apologize for his “love” for Castro, no one should be under the misapprehension that a sea change on attitudes toward the Cuban regime has not already happened. It is that willingness to appease the tyrants of Havana that we should be regretting more than a stupid comment by an overly talkative baseball manager.